You know, I’m terrible with dates. I thought that yesterday, thursday, was tuesday.
So, I’m used to rely on TV commercials, street and shopping propaganda to know when each holiday will take place. The moving ones are the worst! I don’t know when the last carnaval in Brazil was or when the next will be – even though I’m going back there next February and I hope the carnaval will be sometime during February!
Well, here I don’t have a TV, so I get it all online.
Today is, according to the christian tradition, the “Sexta-feira da Paixão”, “Langfredag” or the Friday before Easter. I only found out yesterday, after solving the date confusion (I’m not getting much online, huh? Keep reading…).
Is there Easter in Estonia?
In Brazil, I would know it at least a month before. All supermarkets are full of chocolate eggs, the TV channels getting rich by all Easter commercials, every bus stop has a poster of the huge play about the Passion of Christ and my mom would be reminding us already that, today, the friday before Easter we should not eat meat and be balanced in our actions.
What’s different this year?
I’m in Estonia…
Estonia is a mainly pagan country (if I’m wrong and you are an Estonian, please correct me).
According to Wikipedia:
Estonia’s population is around 1.3 million and it is one of the countries with the highest number of non-religious people in the world – over 76% of the population has no religious affiliation.
The three major christian religions are the Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox and the Russian Old-Believers. In this sea of 1.3 million people, in 2000, 152.000 were Lutherans, 143.000 were Orthodox, 5.000 Catholics and 2.000 Taaras (people that believe in the Estonian mythological god of war Taara – which is part of a pagan inheritage).
Ok, this sums up to 302.000 people… what about the rest? Well, I guess they are either atheists or pagans. No wonder why I didn’t see much about Easter this year. If the people don’t believe in it, you can’t make money out of it. So, no propagandas, no posters (except a very shy one close to Kaubamaja’s bus stop that I saw yesterday), no chocolate eggs.
But, why am I talking about this here? Well, I’m a christian, and considering that a big part of the world is christian, I expect christian signs most places. Once more, my dream about Europe went down the drain.
What really got my attention to this cultural difference was some online Estonian adds that I’ve been stumbling into for quite some time.
By the way, Estonian adds make sounds! Man, they suck! You pass the mouse over them, by mistake, and they start making annoying sounds! Who told Estonian advertising companies that those adds get anyones attention? I don’t even read it (or try, it’s in Estonian!), I just close the window, or reload it and perform the “mission impossible” of going trough the page without getting anywhere near them. That’s another bad, bad idea!
Anyways, the last add showed up when any Easter add would show up, but this one is not really about Easter. It’s about the “Volbriöö”.
Can you imagine? This is Easter season. All that a christian expects are adds about Christ’s death and ressurection, or bunnies with chocolate eggs. But no! Not in Estonia!
Here the adds are dark, with a cartoonish figure of “death”, a cemetery, graves, a full moon, a gravestone and it laughs mockinly whenever you put your cursor over it!
I’m sure this isn’t about Jesus! Not at all!
And it’s certainly not. Like I said, this is about the “Volbriöö”, or the “night of the witches”.
But this I’ll explain in my next post.
PS: I have no problem with pagans… I would rather say that I would have more problems with people that doesn’t believe in anything. That’s too sad for my reason and faith alike.
Daily life in Estonia 